Thirty years after the Revolution, a new generation here is breaking free of their parents’ insularity but holding onto their Persian heritage.

01/27/2010 - 19:00

Sharon Udasin

Staff Writer

Arranged meticulously across a wooden dining table was a Shabbat meal that could have served 30 — fluffy gondhi, “Persian
Meatballs,” still steaming from their broth, Middle Eastern salads and ghormeh sabzi, a green vegetable stew. A Shabbat candle hovered between a spread of tahdig, a crispy rice dish, and shirini polo, a sweet rice blended with almond slivers, orange peels and pistachios.

As IDF rescuers and doctors save lives,
rare praise for a disproportionate response.

01/20/2010 - 19:00

Adam Dickter

Assistant Managing Editor

Israel’s rapid response to the disaster in Haiti and the success of its experienced emergency team in saving many lives has drawn extensive media coverage, and has become a major source of pride in the Jewish community.

The Israel Defense Forces sent 220 personnel to the Caribbean island on Jan. 15, three days after a 7.0-scale earthquake devastated the capital city of Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas. The team included 40 doctors, 20 nurses and paramedics, search-and-rescue teams with trained dogs and other specialists.

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
In light of the controversy over Manis Friedman’s remarks about the Jewish way to wage war against Arabs, here’s something from Chabad.org about how the Lubavitcher rebbe approached the same question, years ago. It was originally posted during Israel’s war in Gaza.
(Click HERE for original page)
Should I Pray For The Death Of Terrorists?
By Tzvi Freeman
Question:

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008
Despite all the apologists, anyone in the United States during the 1940s, particularly a Jew, who said that he or she had no idea about the Holocaust was either an idiot or illiterate. Despite all the attacks on the media for not telling everything, and for not telling it on the front page, any person who read Time magazine, the number one newsweekly in 1943, was given all the information required to know that an extermination was underway that was unparalleled in history.

Sunday, September 28th, 2008
In the end, of course, “Hair” is a Broadway musical, a superficial story with superb songs that just happen to be about drugs, dropouts and draft dodging. Some teenagers, from a yeshiva, told an old man (me) that seeing “Hair” made them wish that they were “activists,” too, like the kids in “Hair,” which is as connected to real life as wanting to be a nanny after seeing “Mary Poppins,” or a horse after “Equus.”

Shortly after the 1979 revolution in Iran, which made many of the country’s Jews nervous about their future in a fundamentalist Muslim country, Iranian Jewish families arranged for a few thousand of their children to come alone to the United States to attend Jewish schools.

In the late 1970s the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the New York-based organization that supports Jewish life in small communities around the world, needed someone to head its office in Tehran.

As Iran continues a policy of delay and division in the face of international concern about its nuclear weapons program, it is time for the Obama administration to reconsider one element of its strategy. That would be to find ways to support a growing movement within Iran that rejects the repressive rule of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the entrenched fundamentalist clerics in power.
As we have said before, there are no easy answers as Iran moves ever closer to the nuclear threshold.